1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the field of software development environments. More specifically, the present invention relates to an environment for iterative software development in which targets can be built from any one of a prioritized list of source files.
2. Background Information
With software companies struggling to beat one another to market with the “latest and greatest” software products and technologies, the need for reduced development times has never been greater. During a typical software development lifecycle, a software development team may go through the steps of analysis, design, construction, and testing before the resulting software application may be successfully deployed. Often times, developers are required to perform numerous iterations of code construction, modification and testing of a design before the product can be deployed. It is often useful for the developer to view and test the results of each incremental software change as it is completed before proceeding to the next change. However, in compiled language environments, the process of rebuilding, deploying and testing complex software projects can be tedious and time consuming. When a large number of iterations is required, the accumulated build and deploy time becomes significant, possibly delaying the release of the software product in a business where short development times are necessary in order to remain competitive.
Accordingly, a number of mechanisms have been employed to speed software generation by reducing development time. For example, integrated development environments (IDE) provide developers with various software development tools for tasks such as editing, compiling, debugging, and so forth. Although IDEs may simplify software development, it is useful to provide iterative software development capabilities at a lower-level, so they are available both inside the IDE and from the command line, where some experienced programmers prefer to work without the overhead often accompanied with IDEs.
Advanced compilers have also been introduced that automate the analysis of complex dependencies between source files in a software project, and that rebuild the minimum subset of the project based on which source files have changed. However, these compilers only work for a single type of source file (e.g., C++ or Java), must be manually activated each time compilation is needed and don't have any way to rapidly determine whether rebuild is needed without performing a dependency analysis.
Therefore, further improvements in the area of iterative software development are desired.